ABSTRACT
The lush “new art” movement, engendered in various ways by Reinhardt, the Ballets Russes, and Urban, was sumptuously represented on November 6, 1916, by The Century Girl, produced jointly by Dillingham and Ziegfeld to open the handsome new Century Theatre, up above Columbus Circle. Part musical comedy and part revue, The Century Girl subsisted on typical Urban-Ziegfeld effects, such as the Celestial Staircase, which Hazel Dawn descended; the Crystal Palace, with a “Procession of the Laces of the World”; and, for spice, a scene in the Garden of a Modern Girls’ School. Victor Herbert and Irving Berlin provided the music; Leon Errol and Edward Royce directed; and Ned Wayburn staged the dances and musical numbers. Errol also displayed his comic ankle; Elsie Janis did her bit; Lillian (not Lilyan this time) Tashman offered her sophisticated beauty as a foil for Hazel Dawn’s fresh innocence; and comic chores were allotted to Sam Bernard, the classic Dutch comic, Frank Tinney, and—in their first of several ventures out of vaudeville under Ziegfeld’s aegis—Gus Van and Joe Schenck, the song pluggers.
